Rambo's View

Opinion Journal ^ | 07 sept 07 | KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

[rellimpank]

Move over Bridge to Nowhere. Congress is back in town, and clearly back to business even uglier than usual.

It takes hard work to come up with an earmark more egregious than that infamous Alaskan bridge, but California's Dianne Feinstein is an industrious gal. Her latest pork--let's call it Rambo's View--deserves to be the poster child for everything wrong with today's greedy earmark process.

The senator's $4 billion handout (yes, you read that right) to wealthy West L.A. (yes, you read that right, too) is the ultimate example of how powerful members use earmarks to put their own parochial interests above national ones--in this case the needs of veterans. It's a case study in how Congress uses the appropriations process to substitute its petty wants for the considered judgments of agency professionals.

[rellimpank]

--needs a repost now that more of us are out of bed--

[Rummyfan]

Feinstein... another shining example of our senate leadership. Along with Schumer and Kennedy and Feingold and McCain and Clinton and......

[Bringbackthedraft]

Feinstein who complained about the pantie torture doesn’t seem to care if we deny our veterans.

[sinanju]

This is about a sprawling and little-used VA facility in LA. The VA was going to sell or lease out some of the unused acreage for much-needed cash but the good Senator’s Hollywood friends had gotten used to having this de facto parkland adjoining their tony mansions and did not want it developed. The article states that the pubbies who might have done something about this backed down in a hurry when Feinstein and Friends threatened their earmarks. This is “Senate Collegiality,” basically our 100 senators of either stripe finding common cause against us peasantry who actually expect them to argue.

If you click on the Reader Responses, someone brings up San Francisco’s historic Presidio Army Base which was closed down in the nineties. The same crew did not want anything done to ruin the rustic ambience so that prime real estate was never sold off. To get a feel for what that place looks like I recommend “The Presidio,” 1988, (good Sean Connery flick).

I think it was also OpinionJournal.com that stated that—because earmarks are usually slipped in during the conference committee phase, they are not properly voted on and the executive branch is not legally required to honor them. The article I read last year stated that about 85-90% of earmarks could simply be ignored. If Dubya had an actual opinion on this issue he might have taken advantage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse to go on the offensive against earmarks rather than let the dems use it as an excuse to demand more taxes.